Quotes About Technology

These days, students struggle with conversation. What makes sense is to engage them in it. The more you think about educational technology, with all its bells and whistles, the more you circle back to the simple power of conversation.

Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind?

The new technologies allow us to "dial down" human contact, to titrate its nature and extent.

Mobile technology is here to stay, along with all the wonders it brings. Yet it is time for us to consider how it may get in the way of other things we hold dear—and how once we recognize this, we can take action: We can both redesign technology and change how we bring it into our lives. A

if we don't have experience with solitude—and this is often the case today—we start to equate loneliness and solitude.

AIBO permits something different: attachment without responsibility.

We miss out on necessary conversations when we divide our attention between the people we're with and the world on our phones. Or when we go to our phones instead of claiming a quiet moment for ourselves

In all of these cases, we use technology to "dial down" human contact, to titrate its nature and extent. People avoid face-to-face conversation but are comforted by being in touch with people—and sometimes with a lot of people—who are emotionally kept at bay. It's another instance of the Goldilocks effect. It's part of the move from conversation to mere connection.

Whenever one has time to write, edit, and delete, there is room for performance.

We are shaped by our tools.

Face-to-face with a computer, people reflected on who they were in the mirror of the machine.

One of the emotional affordances of digital communication is that one can always hide behind deliberated nonchalance.

A woman in her late sixties described her new iPhone: "it's like having a little time square in my pocketbook. All lights. All the people I could meet.

We have to love technology enough to describe it accurately. And we have to love ourselves enough to confront technology's true effect on us.

As technology became our lifeline, we realized how much we missed the full embrace of the human.

Our new media are well suited for accomplishing the rudimentary. And because this is what technology serves up, we reduce our expectations of each other.

We had talk enough, but no conversation. —SAMUEL JOHNSON, THE RAMBLER (1752)

Addiction is to the habits of mind that technology allows us to practice.

In the classic children's story The Velveteen Rabbit, a stuffed animal becomes "real" because of a child's love. Tamagotchis do not wait passively but demand attention and claim that without it they will not survive. With this aggressive demand for care, the question of biological aliveness almost falls away. We love what we nurture; if a Tamagotchi makes you love it, and you feel it loves you in return, it is alive enough to be a creature.

In 1979 Susan Sontag wrote, "Today, everything exists to end in a photograph." Today, does everything exist to end online?

The way we live now is an experiment in which we are the human subjects—treated as objects by the technology we have created. Our apps use us as much as we use our apps.

My own study of the networked life has left me thinking about intimacy - about being with people in person, hearing their voices and seeing their faces, trying to know their hearts. And it has left me thinking about solitude-the kind that refreshes and restores. Loneliness is failed solitude. To experience solitude you must be able to summon yourself by yourself; otherwise you will only know how to be lonely

We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us less lonely. But we are at risk because it is actually the reverse: If we are unable to be alone, we will be more lonely. And if we don't teach our children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely. Yet

Swaddle in our favorites, we missed out on what was in our peripheral vision.